Month: March 2022

Everywhere one looks one finds supposedly sensible ideas on how to end the war in the Ukraine. Yet they are sensible only supposedly, not really.

They all proceed from the premise that the savage rape of the Ukraine has to stop. All God’s children are in agreement there, as they no doubt were on the desirability of stopping the bombing of London in 1940.

Yet in those unsophisticated times people were still able to ask the question: “How?” That pragmatic English question implied that not every outcome was equally acceptable. After all, the easiest way of stopping a war is to surrender.

That can take different shapes, as it could in 1940. Britain’s surrender didn’t have to be called just that, and it wouldn’t necessarily have led to German occupation. Hitler would have been happy with Britain declaring neutrality and agreeing to limit the size of the Royal Navy. He could then pay his undivided attention to the Soviet Union, with good chances of success.

Now, it’s clear that what Lenin called the ‘maximum programme’ hasn’t worked out for Putin. It increasingly appears he’ll be able neither to occupy the Ukraine nor to produce a regime change. This failure is widely perceived as a de facto defeat, although the consensus is that the Ukraine and her friends mustn’t rub Putin’s face in it.

His bloated face, say countless commentators, should be saved. And Zelensky would be well-advised to accept the kind of terms Hitler dangled before Churchill to no avail.

The Ukraine should acknowledge the legitimacy of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and two eastern provinces. Then she must declare her neutrality, forswearing Nato membership in perpetuity.

She should also denazify and demilitarise, meaning ban all fascistic parties (those that polled three per cent of the vote in the latest elections), reduce her armed forces and promise never to accept foreign bases on her soil. Instead, the Ukraine should rely on Nato’s, especially Britain’s, guarantee of protection.

If I were Ukrainian, at this point I’d jump up and shout that actually such a guarantee has been in place since 1994, when Russia, the US and the UK signed the Budapest Memorandum. They pledged to protect the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her giving up Soviet nuclear weapons.

The Ukraine kept her end of the bargain, but the other three signatories demonstrably didn’t. So, if I were Ukrainian, I could be forgiven for feeling ever so slightly sceptical about that idea. But since I’m not Ukrainian, I’ll move right along.

In return for such minor concessions, Russia would withdraw her troops to where they were before 24 February. Bloodshed would stop, both sides would declare victory, Putin’s face would be saved, Macron’s face would be shaved, and Zelensky’s face would appear in encyclopaedias next to the entry for ‘heroism’.

Above all, Ukrainian women and children would no longer be murdered, maimed or sexually abused. Happiness all around. Time to lick the wounds and begin to heal them.

Such is the theme on which Russian, Western and even some Ukrainian commentators improvise endless variations. Yet the variations are gratingly discordant because the theme is faulty.

For any outcome along these lines would constitute a resounding victory for Putin and a crushing defeat not only for the Ukraine, but also for what’s left of the free world.

All those scenarios would make sense if the on-going war were strictly a regional conflict. But because it isn’t, they don’t.

Just scan Putin’s speech of 21 February (the translation is available on the net), and you’ll see that for him the Ukraine is merely the first battle in Russia’s war on the West. As far as he is concerned, the Third World War has already started.

The real enemy is variously identified as America, Britain, Nato or the West. That’s the fortress to be taken, and the Ukraine is merely the first bulwark. And the real enemy, whatever Putin calls it, has already surrendered in advance by showing cowardice in the face of nuclear threats.

That’s why both Biden and Johnson hastened to reassure Putin even before the invasion of the Ukraine that Nato wouldn’t confront him militarily, come what may. And that’s why they’ve refused to enforce a no-fly zone over a devastated Ukraine.

Putin and every mouthpiece at his disposal are hissing the same message at the West round the clock. We know, they happily admit, that we can’t defeat you by a conventional offensive. But we have nuclear weapons and – unlike you – we won’t hesitate to use them if you confront us. Because – unlike you – we don’t mind taking a few million casualties, and you do.

However the war in the Ukraine ends, or rather interrupts, Putin has learned all he needed to know. Wave a nuclear-armed ICBM in the air, and the West will be paralysed.

Thus Biden’s recent assurance that Nato would defend “every inch” of its members’ territory is an encouragement rather than a deterrent. Putin is in no hurry to escalate the war into Poland, Hungary or even Estonia. That can wait. There’s enough of other prey to feast on.

Moldova isn’t a Nato member. Neither is Finland. Neither is Sweden. And Putin and his Goebbelses have been making threatening noises about those countries.

Desist from joining Nato, they’ve been threatening, or else. Don’t forget that Finland used to be part of the Russian Empire, and Sweden its mortal enemy.

So let’s say that tomorrow the Russians start doing to Helsinki what they are currently doing to Mariupol. Obviously the Finns will fight, as they did so brilliantly in the Winter War of 1939-1940, almost holding the Russians to a draw.

But in those days the Soviets didn’t have the same air power they have today. In 1939 they managed to wreak much destruction of Finnish cities, but they didn’t level them. Today they could.

What would be the West’s reaction? New sanctions? Probably. Arms supplies to Finland. Definitely. A no-fly zone? Don’t be silly.

The Russians would just say exactly what they are saying now. That would be an act of war, and we have nuclear… and so on, you know the mantra. Sweden would be next, and I can’t think of any plausible reason to believe that the West would suddenly grow some courage.

Nor should the Baltics rest easy. They may be Nato members, but would Nato risk a strategic nuclear exchange to defend them, Article 5 or no Article 5?

At the time of the Munich conference, Paris Left Bank bobos were sneering: “Mourir pour Danzig?”. Do you think they’d be more eager to die for Tallinn? Somehow I doubt that.

The Ukrainians should realise, as I’m sure they do, that any peace treaty with Russia would merely be a temporary truce. The Russians would regroup and come back in force.

As for Moldova, it’s embarrassing even to mention that tiny country in this context. The Russians could grab it practically without a shot, and no one in the West would demur. And if even a timid objection is raised, well, “we have nuclear weapons, and thank you very much for shutting up.”

This is the time when we need Trumans and Reagans, Churchills and Thatchers, leaders and statesmen. Instead we get… well, you know whom, or rather what, we get. Rather than fighting a Third World War, our spivocrats refuse even to acknowledge that it’s under way already. And we are losing.

P.S. You might say that it’s easy for me to sit at my computer in London and tell Ukrainians to fight to the bitter end. Yet I’m doing no such thing. I don’t know what kind of casualties they’ve suffered, nor how long they can continue to hold on. I’m only trying to analyse the situation as best I can.

P.P.S. Speaking on St Patrick’s Day, Joe Biden said: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.” Wrong on both counts.

Three days before the invasion of the Ukraine Putin made a speech declaring war on the West. Yesterday he made another speech declaring war on his own people.

I wish I had read the first speech on 21 February, when Putin made it. Then I would have had no doubt that Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine was coming within days – and, moreover, that the Ukraine was only a step along the way.

Without boring you with long quotes, I’ll just give you the gist.

The West in general and the US in particular are planning to destroy Russia by a nuclear attack, thereby fulfilling their historical objective going back centuries before such weapons were even developed.

To that end they have set up military bases in the Ukraine (meaning training camps for Ukrainian soldiers) and are helping those Ukie fascists develop their own WMDs, to be used on Moscow.

This, after the West made a solemn promise never to expand Nato eastwards. “I quote,” added Putin, though the transcript of his speech doesn’t feature the requisite quotation marks. That stands to reason, for in the very next sentence Putin explained that he was referring to “verbal agreements”.

(He should have asked his loyal stooge for help. Hitchens regularly refers to “piles of documents” chiselling that promise in stone, which he could quote but for some inexplicable reason never does.)

Hence Russia has no alternative but to stamp the threat out, continued Putin. Nobody threatens the very existence of a sovereign Russian state and gets away with it.

Since the Ukraine is an American puppet, it’s the immediate threat to Russia’s survival. But the ultimate enemy isn’t the puppet but the wire-puller: the West.

All that was eerily reminiscent of similar speeches made by Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War. For the Ukraine, read Poland, which was supposedly preparing to attack Germany and destroy both her sovereignty and Kultur. For the West, read the plutocratic Anglo-Saxons and the Jewish bankers of Wall Street and the City.

But Hitler didn’t just rant about foreign enemies. He also talked about ‘national traitors’, those bacilli gnawing on Germany’s healthy body from within.

To eliminate the vestigial doubts anyone might still harbour about Putin’s role models, yesterday he repeated those diatribes almost verbatim, even using the same term, ‘national traitors’.

Just like der Führer, Vlad didn’t pull back. Describing those national traitors as “scum”, he compared them to a midge getting into one’s mouth. Russia is going to spit those national traitors out, promised Putin, at first without specifying whom exactly he meant by those metaphorical insects.

The oversight was quickly corrected. Those scum traitors are the fifth column working in cahoots with “the collective West trying to splinter our society, speculating on military losses and on socioeconomic effects of sanctions in order to provoke a popular rebellion in Russia…”

And then came the translation from the metaphorical language of “spitting out” into one every Russian can instantly understand: “I am certain that this necessary and natural self-purging of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, togetherness, and our readiness to answer any calls to action.”

Do you detect the turnaround in the vector? The pre-invasion speech was directed outwards, transparently hinting at Russia’s intention to eradicate her external enemies — starting with those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis, then moving on to their Western masters.

Yesterday’s speech switched the accent to the enemies within, which again followed Hitler’s model. But der Führer didn’t talk in vague generalities. He didn’t withhold from his adulating audiences the identity of those internal enemies: Jews, abetted by Gypsies, retards and sexual deviants.

So inspired, Vlad decided to be specific too. First, he magnanimously excluded from the list of traitors to be purged, “those with villas in Miami or the French Riviera” or those “who cannot live without foie gras and oysters…”

In other words he isn’t going to purge Russia’s entire ruling elite (starting with himself) who all show affection for such paraphernalia of Western decadence. Yet they are only off the hook if they are “mentally with Russia” – even if they are physically in London or Nice.

“The problem does not lie in [mansions in Miami, foie gras and oysters], but I repeat, the fact that many of these people inwardly, mentally live elsewhere and not here with us, with our people, with Russia.”

No Russian will fail to get the sinister message. Targetted for purging aren’t Putin’s fellow gangsters, who alone can afford “villas in Miami or the French Riviera”, but all Russians leaning towards the West culturally and spiritually.

They all are to be cast in the role of Hitler’s Jews, traitors to Putin’s version of Russia as a Nazi state standing alone against a hostile world. Their fate is to be gruesome, make no mistake about that.

The word ‘purge’ used by Putin isn’t just significant in its denotation, but also evocative in its connotation. It evokes the cordite stench of Lubyanka cellars, torture, barbed wire fences herding together skeletal inmates of the Gulag, shrill campaigns against ‘enemies of the people’, a whole population bullied into silence and blind obedience.

Yet the version implied by Putin’s speech is more Hitlerite than Stalinist, or rather early Stalinist. In his last years, Stalin too expanded his accent from traitors to the communist ideals to those betraying Russian national values.

After the war Stalin began to see in his mind’s eye the ideal of a Nazi Russia modelled on Hitler’s Germany (complete with a comprehensive Jewish pogrom), but death stopped him in the nick of time. Putin, alas, is still alive, and so far he hasn’t zeroed in on the Jews.

Instead, at least initially, he equates national treason with any preference for civil liberties over dictatorship, and free speech over jammed radio stations, TV channels spewing out nothing but propaganda, closed-down newspapers and blocked Internet.

It’s such preferences, rather than a taste for foie gras and oysters, that constitute treason to be purged. This is bad news for everybody I know in Russia, who are all national traitors at heart. And the news for the West in 2022 isn’t much better than it was in 1938.

We desperately need our Churchills and de Gaulles. Instead we get Chamberlains and Daladiers, but without the intellect and integrity.

P.S. Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair helpfully illustrated my last point yesterday. He wrote: “More than two decades ago I met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg. Back then, he was a Western-oriented leader, wanting to reform Russia.”

It appears that Putin only ever turns bad when his friends, such as Blair and Trump, leave office. Yet those two gentlemen should agree on a common chronology to avoid confusion.

Blair left Downing Street in 2007, Trump moved into the White House in 2017. That’s a gap of 10 years during which Putin became a villain, after and before periods of angelic goodness. The solution is evident: let’s bring Blair and Trump back, to see Putin again not as a Hitler impersonator, but as “a Western-oriented leader”.

“Back then”, Tony, Putin was a KGB officer duping his Western marks to turn them into his unwitting agents of influence.

Ideas Have Consequences, the 1948 book by Richard M. Weaver, is to American conservatism what Das Kapital is to Marxism.

I first read it some 10 years after writing How the West Was Lost, which is my defence against any hypothetical charge of plagiarism. But what interests me today isn’t so much the contents of the book as its title.

Since ideas are expressed in words, Weaver’s title can be profitably paraphrased into mine above. Words, especially those uttered by people with a wide following, do have consequences – even, perhaps especially, when they convey no ideas worthy of the name.

That’s why, at the risk of angering my American friends, I’ll continue to say that the sycophantic praise of Putin by Donald Trump and other Western ‘conservatives’ has done much to embolden the fascist in the Kremlin (or, these days, in his Altai bunker).

Trump is worshipped by Americans (and others) of the rightish persuasion for the same reason Putin is. People like Pat Buchanan happily agree with Trump when he says that Putin “is running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

They look at their governments and feel a richly justified disgust. Hence the idea that anyone different from their awful politicians, especially if he is different in every respect, has to be good.

Such faulty logic explains the adulation of Trump in conservative circles – he is perceived as an outsider, which has to be ipso facto good. His admirers are willing to overlook Trump’s brutishness, vulgarity, ignorance and narcissism. More important, they refuse to acknowledge that Trump’s sycophancy towards Putin makes him an indirect accessory to the on-going carnage.

They defend their stand by saying that underneath it all Trump was tough on Putin. That’s why Russia didn’t attack the Ukraine on his watch.

Using the same logic, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama (in his first term) were great presidents too. After all, Putin didn’t attack the Ukraine during their tenures either.

Nor was Trump tough on Putin. His fans talk about the sanctions Congress imposed while Trump was in office, conveniently forgetting that Trump fought them tooth and nail. Those sanctions came into effect in spite of Trump, not because of him.

On the contrary, he desperately pushed for Russia to be readmitted to G7, a club from which Putin was blackballed after his 2014 bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Trump clearly saw Putin as his ally in their common grievance against the American ‘establishment’. That’s why, when everybody knew Putin had meddled in the presidential election, Trump was demanding that the Ukraine be investigated for that very crime. Funnily enough, Putin was demanding the same thing.

Trump even proposed to Putin that the two countries form a joint “cybersecurity unit” to combat “election hacking”. Putin and his retainers must have had a good laugh about that.

According to Trump, Russia “was right to be there [in Afghanistan],” an attitude that explains why he actively promoted Russia’s expanding influence in Syria.

And in response to others taking exception to Putin’s murders, Trump relied on the old moral equivalence defence: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

In any case, as far as Trump was concerned, Putin’s complicity in any murders, such as the one of Litvinenko in 2006, was unproven. He said: “You know, and I’m not saying this because he says, ‘Trump is brilliant and leading everybody’ – the fact is that, you know, he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

True. A jury of his peers has never found Putin guilty of any crimes. That means, according to Trump, he has never committed any. Why, even his massacre of Ukrainian civilians isn’t criminal on this criterion.

I can’t recall a single critical word Trump has ever uttered about Putin. I do recall countless times he said Putin was “a tough cookie”, “with great charm”, “smart”, “savvy”, “genius”, “strong leader” and some such.

As to Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine’s territory in 2014, Trump claimed Ukrainians welcomed it: “[Putin] is absolutely having a great time… Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff… and now you have people in the Ukraine – who knows, set up or not – but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favour of joining Russia.” (Sorry to be quoting at such length, but I can’t get enough of elegant English.)

Whatever Trump’s day job is, he shouldn’t quit it to become an intelligence analyst. His reading of that situation wasn’t quite accurate, wouldn’t you say? But especially relevant today are Trump’s two bookend statements on either side of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

On 22 February, two days before the invasion, when the world observed Russia’s military build-up with horror, Trump had this to say about his fellow strong leader:

“But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace. How smart is that? And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

And yesterday Trump predictably condemned Russia’s atrocities – but again without saying anything critical about Putin personally. He did admit to a slight miscalculation on his part though:

“I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with – you know, like every trade deal… And then he went in – and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

Before considering the content of that pronouncement, it’s worth commenting on its form. Trump has a tendency to repeat the same words or phrases over and over again within the same statement, which is worrying.

This is called ‘perseveration’ in psychiatry, and it’s usually a symptom of a brain injury or some other organic disorder. Perhaps Trump should concentrate on his own mental health more than he does on Biden’s (which too is cause for concern), and I don’t mean this facetiously.

But that’s by the bye. Important here is that Trump’s view of the world is strictly transactional. He sees every little problem in life as something to be solved by a trade deal. Rather than being a statesman, Trump is a horse trader and bean counter, a man whose sensibilities have been formed by negotiating with Atlantic City mafiosi.

Really worrying is that he believes Putin has changed. Indirectly there’s an aspect of self-vindication there. Trump seems to be implying that yes, he was Putin’s fan when in the White House. But then Putin at that time was ‘smart’, ‘savvy’, ‘genius’ and an all-around good chap who couldn’t see an old woman without helping her across the street.

Alas, when Trump left Washington, Putin changed overnight, by implication partly because Trump was no longer there to keep him on the straight and narrow.

This is arrant, dangerous nonsense – a vindication of Putin by other means and a lamentable failure to understand people, especially those whose interests go beyond ‘deals’.

“Words, words, words,” said Hamlet, meaning they didn’t matter. But they do.

Western politicians act with at least some regard for opinion at the grassroots. This has more to do with bono privato than bono publico, for pleasing the electorate is essential to staying in, or getting into, office. Hence they poll incessantly, trying to calculate the likely electoral response to this or that policy.

And as a rule, the grassroots don’t arrive at their opinions by study, contemplation and analysis. For their intellectual grass to grow, they require constant fertilising with words uttered by figures of authority.

When people held in high esteem, such as Buchanan and Trump, extol Putin’s virtue, that’s fertilising dust sprayed on the grass. This doesn’t mean that everyone on the receiving end will be persuaded – the word ‘everyone’ doesn’t belong in political discourse. But some people will be, and there may be enough of them to skew the polls so much that policy-makers will take notice.

Most conservatives, and I’m using the word loosely, intuitively reach out for authority. This is an echo of times olden, when people’s views on really important things were affected by church doctrine.

Buchanan, Trump and other Putin dupes have, for different and variously merited reasons, built up a capital of authority in such people’s eyes. They’ll take on faith what they hear from such prominent figures more readily than anything they read in The New York Times and The Washington Post, those mouthpieces of ‘liberalism’.

That’s why the inane, ignorant rubbish Trump mouths about Putin tickles the right nerve endings even for some people who have the mind to realise that what he says is indeed inane, ignorant rubbish. And that’s why I tend to be brutal on our own quislings who do Putin’s bidding by consistently saying nice, if mendacious, things about him.

They do untold harm by pushing a domino to create a knock-on effect reaching all the way to Westminster. Words do have consequences, which is why some are life-giving and some are borderline treasonous.

Millions of Ukrainians are facing death with the kind of courage one reads about in war novels but hardly ever witnesses first hand.

Thousands of Russian protesters come out into the streets, knowing that what awaits them is police truncheons, followed by torture in hellhole prisons.

That news editor who smuggled an anti-war poster into the studio during yet another propaganda broadcast on Russian TV, showed the kind of heroism that defies any pessimistic assessment of human nature.

And what is the West showing? Cowardice and hypocrisy.

The most glaring example of the latter was provided by the BBC in its Panorama programme. It was billed as an exposition of Abramovich’s criminality, which made me bewail yet again the abysmal quality of today’s journalism.

The word ‘exposition’ implies new information, new facts. Now, it would be tempting to toot my own horn by saying, references in hand, that I’ve been writing on the same subject, citing the same facts, since Abramovich first befouled London with his sordid presence.

So I have, but I possess no intelligence sources of my own. I didn’t meet witnesses in Moscow’s safe houses, and neither did I smuggle their taped reports out of Russia. Everything I’ve ever written about Abramovich came from books, dozens of them, where his rise from petty crook to Putin’s pet billionaire was documented in painstaking detail.

Hence for at least 20 years anyone with a few quid in his pocket has been able to pop over to Waterstone’s, pick up a book or two, and learn all there was to know about Abramovich and other Russian gangsters.

While at it, another, bigger, expenditure would have equipped our amateur sleuth with a small library of books on Putin and his gang. Such books contain exhaustive information on the evil KGB regime that picked up the relay baton from the communists to rob and tyrannise Russia, subsequently pouncing on her neighbours like a rabid dog.

Yet now not only ignorant philistines who have few interests beyond physical comfort, but even people who actually have read some of those books are feigning surprise. Putin is a monster, Abramovich is a criminal, Russia isn’t our friend – who could’ve thunk.

Where were you, ladies and gentlemen, in 1999-2000, when Putin’s gang was bombing Chechnya flat, reducing its capital to rubble? When Russian fascists were putting Chechen villagers into helicopters and pushing them out at 1,000 feet? When they shot, tortured and raped their way through that breakaway republic?

Where were you when they pounced on Georgia in 2008, annexing some of her territory and shelling her towns? In 2014, when they staged a bandit raid on the Crimea and chunks of eastern Ukraine? In 2015, when they began to use Syrian cities for target practice in preparation for war in Europe?

Where were you when the Russians declared – and waged! – hybrid war on the West? When they bought our politicians and hacks both retail and wholesale? When they used every possible media outlet, including some you yourselves have provided, to conduct an all-out propaganda assault on the West? When they attacked our electronic waves and corrupted our elections?

Where were you when Putin’s ghouls were murdering dissidents (including 156 journalists) at home and émigrés abroad? When they gave those truncheons a good workout whenever people protested, as they did across the river from the Kremlin in 2012? How dare you accuse Russians of staging only limited protests if you didn’t lift a finger when unlimited ones were stamped into the dirt?

Where were you when the Russians blackmailed the West with their energy supplies? When they openly laundered billions (trillions?) through Western financial institutions and property markets? When they used those laundered funds to buy up not only our palaces and mansions but also, more damaging, our newspapers?

Don’t bother to answer any of those questions. I’ll do that for you.

You were gleefully accepting the dirty money pouring into your coffers, turning them into cesspits. This, though you knew perfectly well that those banknotes were covered not only with slime, but also with blood.

You were seeking an accommodation with Putin’s kleptofascist gang, lying that Russia was on the road to virtue. You called for sympathetic understanding of Putin, an acknowledgement of Russia’s national interests.

You failed to react to Putin’s crimes with anything other than perfunctory sanctions and fulsome expressions of concern. Even when his murderers were eliminating his enemies in your capitals, you were willing to overlook overwhelming evidence and claim that Putin’s involvement was unproven.

Your politicians, even some currently serving, were playing lickspittle to Putin and his gangsters. People like Osborne, Trump, Mandelson, Biden, Macron, Merkel (you can extend the list on your own) were happy to engage in photographed foreplay with Deripaska and other career criminals. And former high-ranking politicians, like Chancellor Schröder and Prime Minister Fillon, avidly raked in Putin’s millions when serving on the boards of his thoroughly criminalised companies.

You’ve systematically and criminally destroyed your own energy industries, leaving your countries vulnerable to Putin’s blackmail. And you’ve achieved a similar end by reducing your armed forces to a risible level barely sufficient for performing even police functions.

You allowed the funds purloined from the Russian people or provided by the FSB (typically both) to buy up our institutions, such as banks, football clubs, charitable organisations and even newspapers. You elevated to the Lords – a key component of our government – a louche sleazebag who used his father’s KGB money to buy two London newspapers and then seduce our political elite with lavish parties and Lucullan feasts.

You obligingly provided your newspaper inches, nay feet, for Putin’s loathsome shills to bring their nauseating propaganda to our media, thereby legitimising lies designed to smooth the fascists’ way to greater power. You claim that those quislings were exercising freedom of speech, whereas in fact they were – still are! – spreading enemy propaganda.

You’ve allowed Putin to finance and direct a sort of Fourth International of marginal European parties on both right and left, doing exactly the same job as the previous three Internationals did: fracturing, subverting and weakening the West.

And now you’re hiding behind the smokescreen of claimed ignorance supposedly lifted by the BBC’s rehashing of facts long in the public domain. Moreover, you exacerbate your complicity in Putin’s crimes by cowering behind the technicalities of Nato articles to refuse the Ukraine protection from murderous bombings.

At the same time you are paying Putin $1 billion a day for his gas, financing the bombs and shells murdering Ukrainians.

You welcome the dawn of belated understanding, whereas in fact you’ve understood nothing and learned nothing. You quake in your boots at the slightest hint of a Third World War, refusing to acknowledge it’s under way already.

The Russians have set up 14 recruitment offices in Syria, enlisting Shahiba and other terrorists, thousands of them, as much-needed reinforcements for their efforts to kill as many Ukrainians as possible. Hezbollah, Hamas and Taliban militants will be next if the war lasts another fortnight.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that Putin, that flag-bearer for an Orthodox Third Rome, is happily recruiting Muslim terrorists in Chechnya and Syria to massacre predominantly Orthodox Ukrainians. I wonder what the Patriarch Kirill (known in the KGB annals as ‘Agent Mikhailov’) thinks about that.

The Ukraine doesn’t have to look for foreign fighters. She can barely arm the thousands of volunteers already beating a path to her door.

They come from France, Spain, Poland, Italy, Japan, US, Canada and other civilised countries. And I’m proud, vicariously, that 150 of our Paras are also fighting for our common freedom in the Ukraine.

Now I wonder how long it’ll be after the ceasefire before the West lifts all sanctions on Putin’s regime. Before it resumes its efforts to understand Russia’s legitimate concerns about those hordes of frightful Estonians who may sweep across the border to Moscow.

Judging by the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine, they probably could.

P.S. Taking close to heart the advice ‘know thy enemy’, I watched a propaganda show on Russian TV yesterday.

And lo and behold, there was my erstwhile mate, the pianist Boris Berezovsky (not to be confused with the gangster of the same name garrotted in Surrey on Putin’s orders), five stone heavier than I remember him in London some 30 years ago, and even more cynical.

He was accusing the West of spreading lies about Russia, the Ukraine of having started the war to do Nato’s bidding (or the other way around, can’t remember), and every civilised country in the world of imposing sanctions that, however, will fail to defeat Russia’s indomitable spirit. Complaining that the Russians were unforgivably soft in their conduct of the war, he proposed the kind of steps that even made another guest, a captain in the Russian navy, warn against creating a humanitarian disaster.

Can’t help thinking that the Russians bumped off the wrong Boris Berezovsky.

In the summer of 1209, the Albigensian Crusade was gathering momentum. Béziers, a Cathar stronghold in Languedoc, was surrounded and about to be stormed.

The Crusaders were out to eradicate Catharism, an offshoot of the Bulgarian gnostic sect of the Bogomils. This was one of the deadliest heresies ever to threaten the survival of Christendom, quite on a par with Arianism in that respect.

Not to plunge too deep into theology, the Cathars were dualists. To them, there were two Gods, not one. The good God of the New Testament eternally fought the evil God of the Old Testament, with both enjoying equal status. The domain of the good God was the spirit, good when pure. The bad God ruled over the flesh, irredeemably and invariably evil.

One can hear the echoes of some Eastern doctrines there, such as Buddhism. Yet Buddhism was too far away to threaten Christendom. Catharism, on the other hand, was a rapidly growing malignant tumour in the very body of Europe.

That heresy contradicted the monotheistic essence of Christianity, putting the Church in jeopardy. And in those unsophisticated times, it was the Church, rather than Instagram, that was the cornerstone of our civilisation. So at peril there was more than just Catholic doctrine.

Pope Innocent III tried to explain to the Cathars the error of their ways, sending his legates and missionaries to Languedoc. The Cathars, whose religion was more Asian than European, responded in a way popular in Asia at the time. By way of saying ‘no’, they killed the legates and the missionaries.

Finally, in 1209, the Pope was left with no option but to announce a Crusade later named after Albi, the Cathars’ capital city. And so to Béziers.

The reshuffled demographics of the city featured a sizeable population of Catholics, whom the Crusaders wanted to get out of harm’s way. They offered them free passage out of Béziers, but the offer was firmly declined.

The Crusaders attacked, and it was clear Béziers couldn’t hold out for long. At that point, the soldiers asked the papal legate Arnaud Amalric how they could separate the wheat of the Catholics from the chaff of the Cathars.

His reply went down in history as an oft-quoted (if possibly apocryphal) aphorism: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” Kill them all. God will claim his own.

Cruel though that advice was, it was practical. Since Catholics and Cathars were physically indistinguishable, the latter could have got away by pretending to be the former.

Béziers fell and most of its citizens died. But the aphoristic phrase, in various translations, lives on. It’s widely used today, mainly by people who don’t know its origin but fancy themselves as intrepid commandos. (Boys of all ages are often given to such fantasies.)

I’m sure even Putin must have heard the phrase – one can detect its inspiration behind his actions. Thus some may be tempted to equate his propensity for waging wars of terror with the Albigensian Crusade or other medieval conflicts. This only goes to show how dangerous it is to draw historical parallels.

The Crusaders believed, with ample justification, that their Church, and therefore their civilisation, was at stake. Hence those who think that civilisation was worth keeping must see their cause as just.

Had the Cathars prevailed, Europe wouldn’t have found the resolve to repel alien conquerors, at that time mainly Muslim. Houellebecq’s novel Submission would read not as a dystopic tale of an Islamic Europe, but as reportage.

By contrast, Putin’s cause is seen as just only by fascists, actual, vicarious or aspirational, wherever they crawl out of the swamp.

The existence of a free, westward-looking Ukraine in no way threatened the survival of Putin’s Russia and her civilisation, such as it is. The Ukraine could have joined the EU, Nato or for that matter a Pall Mall club, and Putin could still have continued unimpeded to suppress free speech in Russia, terrorise the few protesters, flog hydrocarbons and launder the proceeds, enriching his acolytes and impoverishing everyone else.

In the likely event the Ukraine had gone on to become freer and more prosperous than Russia, the Russians might have got restless. But Putin’s early career in the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate ideally equipped him with crowd-control tools.

That toolbox includes bullets, poison, concentration camps, torture, rubber truncheons – whatever the job takes. Putin’s CV should leave one in no doubt that he owns such tools and is more than willing to wield them.

All in all, his cause isn’t to save his country but to subjugate someone else’s. No way would Augustine describe Putin’s current war as bellum iustum, just war.

Those 1209 Crusaders made every effort to convert the heretics or, barring that, to save their own kind, the Béziers Catholics. Putin’s conduct is quite different.

The Ukrainians aren’t heretical or apostate Russians, but a separate nation with its own culture, language and history. Its roots are similar, though far from identical, to Russia’s, but then so are the roots of Britons and, say, Germans.

Anglo-Saxons originate from what today is Germany, which doesn’t entitle the Germans to bomb British cities, although at one point they did try. Nor is Britain entitled to bomb New Delhi because India used to belong to Britain.

Putin is making no attempt to save his own kind, quite the opposite. About 20 per cent of the Ukrainians are ethnically Russian, and east of the Dnieper that proportion is closer to a third. Thus at least 300 out of every 1,000 Ukrainians killed by Putin’s bombs are the very same ethnic Russians he claims to be protecting. And the bunker hermit has form in that gruesome endeavour.

In 1999-2000 Russian bombers wiped out Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. At least 80 per cent of its population were Russians, different in their language, ethnicity and religion from the Chechens.

That, incidentally, should put paid to any attempt to identify countries strictly by the blood mix of their inhabitants. No major nation can boast an ethnically homogeneous population, nor can many individuals claim to be ethnically pure. But that doesn’t mean that nations don’t exist – only that blood and soil nationalism is a pernicious chimera.

Nations are brought together by shared culture, history, customs, injunctions and, above all, self-perception. A Russian baby adopted and raised by an English family will grow up English, not Russian. He’ll prefer warm beer to cold vodka, restraint to emotional incontinence, and, if so inclined, he’d choose Dickens over Tolstoy, Shakespeare over Pushkin or – in extreme cases – Elgar over Prokofiev.

Putin is obsessed with another chimera, that of a Pax Russica, some mystical ‘Russian world’ uniting Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and any other peoples he wants to conquer. They are all supposed to be the same family torn asunder by evil Anglo-Saxons.

If he genuinely believes that nonsense, his crime is even more monstrous. The arithmetic I mentioned earlier no longer applies: his own people add up not to 300 victims out of a 1,000, but to the whole thousand. He is carpet-bombing his own family.

Moreover, Putin is even attacking the escape routes, crowded with desperate Ukrainians of any ethnic origin, trying to flee from Russian fascism. No Albigensian chivalry there, no attempt to save his own kind from slaughter.

Killing people out of hand can’t be justified by anything other than a just cause. The Albigensians had that; Putin doesn’t. They tried to give their own people a chance to escape; he bombs their escape routes. He can’t be justified under any circumstances; they…

I won’t complete that sentence lest I may be accused of moral relativism or, eschewing political correctness, even Hottentot morality (“If I steal his cow, that’s not good. If he steals my cow, that’s bad.).

Yet it’s not I but human nature that’s morally relativist. Recognising this, the founders of our civilisation taught that evil though violence is, it’s justifiable if it prevents a greater evil. The violence of those Albigensian Crusaders falls into that category. Putin’s violence doesn’t. It’s just evil.

P.S. Speaking of moral relativism, while the West helps the Ukraine with one hand, it’s paying Putin $1 billion for his gas — every day. Something tells me that money won’t be used for social care.

My heartstrings have been tugged so violently, they are about to snap.

Seldom have I seen such a passionate, nostalgic declaration of love for the city of my birth, Moscow, and for “the old, kindly Russia, raped and murdered by Communists”.

In fact, I got so misty-eyed it took me a full five seconds to realise that Peter Hitchens was up to his usual tricks.

They follow, with nary a variation, the same pattern of almost mathematical quality. Today’s piece adorns the formula with soppy romantic touches, and no doubt some readers won’t see the forest of bias for the trees of lachrymose prose.

I sympathise with Hitchens. Unlike Putin, Lavrov, Soloviov et al., he can’t serve Putinesque panegyrics straight as they come. Their rancid taste has to be masked with treacly mixers to produce a cocktail his credulous readers can swallow without wincing.

The ratio has changed since the war started. Hitchens used to be heavy-handed when pouring his poison about Putin, the “strong leader” turning Russia into “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

That sort of thing has been blown to bits, along with the bodies of thousands of Ukrainians. If people tasted such concoctions now, they’d spit them out in revulsion. Hence they have to be tricked by changing the recipe, made to believe their minds aren’t being poisoned.

The recipe always has the same ingredients, and I’m sorry to see an otherwise competent journalist being so formulaic.

First, plead emotional attachment to the Russia of “low, graceful old houses, trees and churches”. Within that tear-jerking narrative, slyly establish your bona fides as an expert by extolling “Russia, where I spent two of the most astonishing years of my life”.

Second, put up a shield to ward off the slings and arrows shot by those who can see through the ploy: “And if you think, as some spiteful people do, and have said, that I do all this because I am in Russian pay… then you are terribly mistaken.”

Since I’ve been writing about Hitchens’s Putinophilia for at least 10 years, I must be more spiteful than most. For the record then, I’ve never written that Hitchens is a paid agent of influence. What I have said on a few occasions is that I struggle to imagine how different his writing would be if he were.

Third, put those spiteful people to shame by establishing a family history of British patriotism: “My father (who hated Stalin and all his works) ferried tanks to the Soviet Union on the terrible Murmansk convoys…”

Alas, that intrepid Hitchens père didn’t do a good job bringing up his sons. The talented sibling Christopher remained a flaming leftie to his dying breath, while Peter himself was a Trotskyist well into his thirties. Then again, Trotskyists hated Stalin too, so perhaps there’s no contradiction there.

Hitchens’s preamble out of the way, it’s time to deliver, as if in passing, the real message “that Western stupidity helped to bring it [the war] about.”

For once I’m ready to nod enthusiastically and shoot up my thumb, rather than the customary two fingers. I too think it was Western stupidity that emboldened Putin, but my understanding of that failing is the opposite of Hitchens’s.

He has been dutifully parroting Putin’s line about Russia feeling threatened by the likes of Estonia joining Nato. That’s bilge and, if you want to know why, just look up any of my earlier pieces on the same subject.

By contrast, my charge of the West’s criminal stupidity uses real evidence: negligence in failing to prepare for confrontation with Putin’s evil regime; failure to understand that Putin’s regime is indeed evil; corrupt eagerness to launder Russian trillions without any due diligence; suicidal energy policy, delivering a strategic advantage to evil; rampant decadence, which made Putin see the West as a soft touch.

I consider the West stupid because it has failed to do so many right things. Hitchens considers the West stupid because of something it has done right: offering the Nato umbrella to small nations threatened by a fascist regime.

Then comes a bit of disinformation, with a contortionist pat on Hitchens’s own back: “I keep telling you that Russia isn’t strong. This stupid, brutal war has proved it.”

Disregarding Hitchens’s stock claim to oracular insights, “this stupid, brutal war” is proving exactly the opposite.

Russia is much stronger than the West because she is prepared to fight and take horrendous casualties, and the West isn’t. She is also ready to wage a war of total annihilation, while the West will offer anything, including abject surrender, to avoid one. Russia is prepared to use first-strike nuclear weapons, while the West wouldn’t even consider such a possibility. Even its readiness to launch a retaliatory strike is in doubt.

A mendacious cause can’t be propped up with impeccable logic. Hitchens proves that by serving up an obvious lapse.

If Russia is as weak as he says, then surely we must do all we can to help those heroic Ukrainians slay the fascist monster? Hitchens disagrees.

Because Russia is so weak, the West, according to him, must surrender. We should “do nothing to extend or prolong war, for the longer and deeper the war is, the more people will die and be maimed.”

What exactly is it that we do and should stop doing? We are not, after all, sending our soldiers into battle, and we aren’t lifting a finger to protect Ukrainian civilians from murderous carpet bombing.

We are helping Ukrainians with arms, finance and logistic support. We are helping (not very eagerly, it must be said) those millions of Ukrainians fleeing from Europe’s “most conservative and Christian” murderers. We are trying to downgrade Putin’s war effort with economic sanctions.

If we follow Hitchens’s thinly veiled prescription and desist from all that, evil will conquer. The Ukrainians will again be “raped and murdered” by the heirs to the same regime Hitchens used to love as a grown-up man.

I only wish he spared us the sentimental tosh about people getting killed and maimed. We are all weeping for them – and I perhaps more than most, for the war is directly affecting members of my family, both in Kiev and Moscow.

But Hitchens has forfeited the right to vent such emotions. He has been playing Quisling to Putin’s Hitler for too long for his protestations to produce any other than an emetic effect.

He and his likeminded colleagues have done much to create a pro-Putin bias in our society, especially its margins on both right and left. Now that Hitchens’s “most conservative and Christian country in Europe” has uncapped a gushing well of Ukrainian blood, some of those scarlet drops have fallen on his hands.

If we go strictly by official post, then Sergey Lavrov’s closest Nazi analogue was Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister during the Second World Special Operation.

Yet Lavrov forfeited any claim to being a top diplomat, indeed a diplomat at all, in 2008, when our Foreign Secretary David Miliband had the gall to question Russia’s record on human rights.

Showing an enviable command of the English language, if some disdain for diplomatic protocol, Lavrov replied: “Who the fuck are you to lecture me?” What happened to “This is outside my remit, but I’ll look into it”? Or, more committal, “We’ve progressed in that department since Stalin’s time, so let’s talk that trade deal”?

In a way, that was honest of Lavrov. He communicated to the world in no polite terms that his job was propaganda, not diplomacy.

And in that field Lavrov is guided by the observation first enunciated by Dr Goebbels. “The English,” he said, “follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

That comment was meant to be critical, but Lavrov took it as a call to action. The more brazen a lie, he realised, the more likely would people be to believe it. Thanks for the tip, Joseph.

It must be said that Lavrov is striking powerful blows for the notion of unremitting progress. Though taking his cue from Goebbels, he has outdone the old master many times over. And at the same time, he has proved Marx wrong.

Commenting on the contemporaneous situation in France, Marx wrote that history appears twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Lavrov, however, shows that these two genres don’t have to be practised consecutively. They can happily coexist side by side.

Yesterday I mentioned his farcical comment on Russia’s geopolitical plans. “We aren’t going to attack any other countries,” he said. “We didn’t attack the Ukraine either.” Could have fooled me.

But didn’t Russia sign a pledge to guarantee the Ukraine’s territorial integrity? When a journalist posed that question, Lavrov pointed out his mistake: “If you’re talking about the Budapest Memorandum, we have not violated it. It contains only one obligation – not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.”

He sounded so convincing that I had to look up the text of that document. And sure enough, the first obligation mentioned in the Budapest Memorandum is “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

Never mind casuistic details. In fact, explained Lavrov, “We want a friendly Ukraine”. No doubt that’s true. It’s just that Russia’s approach to making friends strikes me as somewhat unconventional.

Not that I propose to hold myself up as an example to follow, but when I wish to befriend someone, I don’t beat him to a pulp first, then murder his whole family and set his house on fire. Yet I’m willing to admit that Lavrov has garnered a deeper understanding of human relations.

Even though Russia didn’t attack the Ukraine, Lavrov helpfully explained why she did. The reason for invading the Ukraine, he said, was that the US was using her “territory to create a biological weapon, and an ethnically targeted one at that”.

Those dastardly Yanks are devilishly clever, and I’m using the word ‘devilishly’ advisedly. They are on the threshold of developing pathogens that kill Russians, while sparing Ukrainians. I wouldn’t put such deviousness past them, but there’s a slight snag there.

How can those viruses distinguish between the two groups if, as Lavrov’s immediate superior has explained a thousand times, the Russians and the Ukrainians are the same people?

Well, they are, except that, according to the official belief, the Russians are uniquely blessed with an extra gene of spirituality. One has to infer that the Yank virus is designed to zero in on that special gene, which indirectly proves it exists.

But how will that satanic weapon be delivered into the bloodstream of uniquely spiritual Russians? Lavrov neglected to go into such technicalities, which oversight was helpfully corrected by Gen. Konashenkov, Defence Ministry spokesman:

“We were particularly interested in the detailed reports that the US was using the Ukraine’s territory to conduct experiments in spreading pathogens through wild birds migrating between the Ukraine and Russia.”

I wonder what the Geneva Convention has to say about avian terrorism. If those nit-pickers haven’t yet got around to banning birds, they should. And while they are contemplating the necessary steps, the NSPCA should issue a ringing denunciation of this mass cruelty to avian Americans.

But let’s forget such WMDs for the time being. According to Gen. Konashenkov, they are still in development. What about the real bombs levelling Ukrainian cities, burying thousands under the rubble, including women and children?

Trust you to ask such provocative questions. One can tell you don’t watch Russian TV, especially Vladimir Soloviov’s programme on the First Channel. He is one of the propagandists trying to rival Lavrov for the honour of being the Russian Goebbels.

Though I’m sure Lavrov will win in the end, if only by pulling rank, Soloviov is doing his level best. Yesterday he laughingly advocated a “bang! and everything turns to dust” scenario as a way of telling Nato to mind its own business.

Yes, but what about those Ukrainian women and children? Oh well, if you insist.

You see, those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis are bombing their own cities to besmirch Russia’s otherwise stainless reputation. And, though the Russians would never carpet-bomb residential areas, thousands of Ukrainian women and children are dying because Ukie Nazis are using them as human shields.

Some 70 to 80 per cent of the Russians support Putin’s Special Operation, which means they deserve Putin. But they do have a mitigating circumstance: Lavrov and his ilk are lying not only externally but also domestically.

The idolised Russian warrior (Special Operator?), Suvorov, once said: “Every soldier must know his manoeuvre.” He might have practised what he preached, but Col. Putin’s men made sure Russian soldiers went into the Ukraine as blind as newly born kittens.

They were told to expect a cakewalk, followed by a victory parade. That’s why they only carried rations for two days in their knapsacks. The saved space was filled with dress uniforms, to be worn on parade grounds.

The general impression conveyed by the domestic lies was that any problems likely to be encountered called for police action only. Thus, close to a quarter of the invading contingent were not soldiers, but either policemen or internal troops, equipped with a large consignment of rubber truncheons and crowd-control shields.

When the shooting started in earnest, those men had to be retrained as infantry, which fast-tracked programme ideally prepared them for acting as sacrificial lambs. And speaking of those sacramental animals, some Russian pilots were also tricked.

There are many reports of the parachutes of ejecting Russian pilots failing to open. Accidents do happen, one or two. But when there are many more, one has to suspect they aren’t exactly accidental.

Apparently, the Russians deliberately equipped novice pilots, those most likely to be shot down, with faulty parachutes to make sure they couldn’t act as future witnesses for the prosecution.

Japanese kamikaze pilots leaving their parachutes on the ground before taking off come to mind, but with one salient difference. They knew they were flying suicide missions. No one had lied to them they could safely bail out if hit.

I hope that Lavrov (and Putin’s other bandits, including the bunker hermit himself) will end up treated to either Goebbels’s cyanide pill or Ribbentrop’s noose. I’d even be willing to let him choose.

Her Majesty’s Government has finally moved to sanction Roman Abramovich, mainly known in Britain as the owner of Chelsea FC. The sanctions involve the freezing of all his UK assets, including Chelsea FC.

Now, though Abramovich shows a lamentable deficit in basic human qualities, such as decency and morality, he has plenty of street smarts.

Sensing that the sanctions were coming, he has been desperately trying to sell Chelsea FC. Yet moving a club valued at somewhere between two and three billion isn’t easy, especially when one is in a hurry.

A free tip for HMG: Abramovich and some of his fellow Russian ‘oligarchs’ started flogging their assets weeks before Putin pounced on the Ukraine. To an outside observer (well, me), this looks suspiciously as if they knew the invasion was on the cards, but kept that knowledge among themselves. That makes them directly complicit in Putin’s war crimes, a charge compared to which their corrupt ways look positively innocuous.

Chelsea FC has been left rudderless and penniless. The club isn’t allowed to sell tickets and merchandise, to sign any contracts, including those for players, to spend more than £22,000 for travelling to away matches (good news for EasyJet). Above all, selling it becomes problematic because Abramovich isn’t allowed to receive any payment for Chelsea FC, never mind three billion.

Since the will to sell is evident, I’m sure a way can be found. Off the top, HMG could nationalise Chelsea FC, sell it off to the highest bidder and use the proceeds for providing armaments to the Ukraine.

If we can confiscate the property of known drug dealers, we must have laws to do the same to gangsters directly complicit in mass murder. Should this prove impossible, Chelsea FC could well go bust, and you won’t see me shedding tears.

All I can offer to the crestfallen fans is a compendium of clichés, such as “what goes around, comes around”, “you make your bed, you lie in it” or, to please some of the more upmarket supporters, “tu l’as voulu, George Dandin”.

For me, the plight of Chelsea FC serves as an antiemetic. For ever since Abramovich acquired the club in 2003, I’ve been suffering from acute nausea every time those smug fans sang his name at matches.

They couldn’t even claim they didn’t know where Abramovich’s money came from, although some did try. That’s like the Germans saying they didn’t know about Nazi concentration camps or the Russians pleading ignorance of Stalin’s crimes. If they didn’t know, they didn’t want to know. Therefore they are guilty not just of stupidity, but also of complicity in evil.

Had I felt any residual pity for Chelsea fans, I would have lost it yesterday, when their team played its first post-Abramovich match away at Norwich. Those cynical morons were singing “There’s only one Roman Abramovich”, stressing yet again their unwavering commitment to money, regardless of its source.

Here I can’t resist drawing the oft-drawn, not to say overdrawn, parallel. What if the Second World War had ended in a draw, and a Nazi businessman bought Chelsea FC in 1943 with the proceeds of selling the property of murdered Jews? Would the fans have been as ecstatic? I bet they would.

“I told you so” isn’t my favourite genre, but I’ve been writing about Abramovich off and on for years, starting on 4 September, 2012. Most of that had an aspect of preaching to the choir: the facts of Abramovich’s rise from petty larceny to building an empire were in the public domain. Hence all decent people were as appalled as I was.

Those who refused to learn the facts were contemptible. Those who knew the facts and still welcomed Abramovich to London were beneath contempt.

Abramovich made his first billion in 1995, when he and his partner Boris Berezovsky made a killing from the elaborate robbery of the Russian people known in the annals of crime as the loans-for-shares programme.

Without going into too much detail, they used government loans to pay $200 million for the oil company Sibneft. Since the company was worth $2.7 billion at the time, that was like buying money at a huge discount.

The discount wasn’t as huge as it looked though. For Abramovich admitted later that he had paid billions in bribes to government officials and protection money to gangsters. Still, considering that Sibneft produces about $3 billion’s worth of oil annually, that deal paid off handsomely

Abramovich’s and Berezovsky’s next target was the aluminium industry, and in his book Godfather in the Kremlin Paul Khlebnikov described that move in some detail. He specifically mentioned some owners of smelting plants who were reluctant to sell at a knock-down price and then suffered fatal accidents.

One such befell Khlebnikov himself. He was machinegunned from a moving car in the centre of Moscow, which, if you ask me, is a rather extreme type of literary criticism. The late editor of the Russian Forbes didn’t cite any hard evidence of Abramovich’s involvement in ‘wet work’, but his hints were broad enough.

Yet a man doesn’t live by corruption alone, not in Russia at any rate. American gangsters bribe politicians; Russian ones create them. That’s why I am dismayed at the shoddy coverage of Abramovich’s “links with Putin” in our press.

Chaps, but for Abramovich, if Putin wanted to see the inside of the Kremlin he’d have to buy a guided tour. For Abramovich was a key player in the feat of political legerdemain known as ‘Operation Successor’ – to President Yeltsyn, that is.

Those obsessed with Abramovich’s Western residences worth billions are overlooking one of his former residences that cost him nothing. Yet without that freebie he wouldn’t have bought his £150 million palace in Kensington.

For in 1996 the Yeltsyn family invited Abramovich to move into an apartment inside the Kremlin. By then he had become a key member of that cabal, widely described as ‘the Family’, in the Cosa Nostra sense of the word.

Besides Abramovich, the Family included Yeltsyn’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, her second husband Valentin Yumashev and Boris Berezovsky. It was the Family that launched Operation Successor, when Yeltsyn’s lifelong attempt at suicide by booze was about to triumph.

The Family chose Putin, a relative newcomer to national politics. Unlike the likelier KGB candidate, Prime Minister Primakov, Putin was willing to offer immunity to Dyachenko and Yumashev, and believe me: there was plenty to immunise them against. That clinched the deal, and the button for a delayed-action bomb was pushed.

Neither Abramovich nor Yumashev was Berezovsky’s intellectual equal, but both were more ‘street’. Thus, having acted as Pygmalion to Putin’s Galatea, they fell in love with their creation, or at least wisely pretended to. Having quickly realised the dimensions of the power acquired by the KGB colonel, they happily assumed subservient roles.

Both have flourished since then. Yumashev has been Putin’s trusted advisor all these years, which, aside from wielding political influence, means he has become a billionaire. And Abramovich was allowed to keep and multiply his billions, provided he loosened his purse strings whenever Putin was a little short.

But Berezovsky’s hubris got the better of him. He thought Putin would become his poodle, rather than the other way around. That miscalculation drove Berezovsky into his British exile, where in 2013 he lost his life to a garrotte. The coroner passed an open verdict, probably encouraged to do so by HMG’s reluctance to rock the boat.

As for those imbecilic fans of Chelsea FC, they got that wrong: there’s more than one Roman Abramovich. Putin’s close entourage consists of dozens of such acolytes, each covered head to toe in Ukrainian blood.

No, they never killed anyone personally, gangland style. But then neither did Vlad Putin.

P.S. Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov made an odd statement yesterday. “We aren’t planning to attack other countries,” he said. “We didn’t attack the Ukraine either.” In other words, “We won’t attack other countries like we didn’t attack the Ukraine”.

“A wave of anti-Russian hysteria is sweeping the West,” complains Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator, and in some ways he is right.

For example, some Dutch concert venues are cancelling performances of works by Russian composers who all predate Putin by a century or so. That’s indeed hysterical, and a nuanced argument could well be made against such overreaction.

My nuanced argument would revolve around my wife Penelope who is a concert pianist. One of her programmes for this season includes Prokofiev’s Third Sonata, and she’ll be damned if she removes it. In fact, having at times found myself (deservedly!) on the receiving end of her wrath, I don’t envy any concert organiser who’d dare make such a suggestion.

Prokofiev died in 1953, when little Vova Putin was a babe in arms (not to be confused with an armed barbarian). Hence it would be hard, though clearly not impossible, to blame the composer for the thermobaric bombs murdering Ukrainian civilians.

There is an issue of individual guilt and collective responsibility to consider as well. Anyone who believes in free will should hesitate to blame a large group en masse, irrespective of individual culpability.

And I bet many Russians abhor Putin’s crimes as much as I do. However, all bets are off at wartime. Much as we may deplore it, collateral damage is unavoidable.

A pilot bombing an armament factory might regret the deaths of hundreds of workers, many of them apolitical or even oppositional. But he will still push the ‘bombs away’ button with a sense of righteousness.

These days one hears more bromides about the war than can be found at John Bell & Croydon, London’s largest pharmacy. One of them is that most Russians are decent people who have nothing to do with Putin and his crimes.

That’s lazy, crepuscular thinking, with a heavy dose of ignorance thrown in for good measure. Even forgetting for a moment de Maistre’s adage about every nation getting the government it deserves, most Russians definitely deserve Putin.

Throughout his kleptofascist KGB reign, Putin has received wide domestic support. Even accounting for the profusion of stuffed ballot boxes, Putin has also enjoyed solid electoral support as well.

Bemoaning the treatment of most cultured Russians would have a more solid basis. Without running a poll, I’d venture a reasonably educated guess that much of the Russian intelligentsia is opposed to Putin. Yet even there I’d refrain from saying ‘most’.

Anyway, this is a possible subject for discussion. But not when it’s discussed with O’Neill’s refreshing ignorance and intellectual paucity.

He bases his argument on the plight of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, “one of the greatest in the world by all accounts”. Following Putin’s attack on the Ukraine, Gergiev has lost all his numerous jobs in the West, which O’Neill thinks is just awful.

Music, writes O’Neill, is apolitical, and an artist’s political views shouldn’t matter. Really? Music may be apolitical, but the way it’s used by despots certainly isn’t.

Since O’Neill clearly knows nothing about music, he probably has never heard any of the names I’m about to drop: Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Strauss, Gieseking, Cortot, Schwarzkopf. These are some of the great musicians who were denazified after the war, with their careers blighted or even destroyed.

When accounts are settled after a major cataclysm, some basic precepts of fairness often fall by the wayside. Thus Furtwängler was treated more harshly than Karajan, even though the former was much less culpable than the latter.

Furtwängler (for me, the greatest conductor who has ever lived) was no Nazi, but his signature did adorn a few articles about German music being superior to the Jewish kind. He had a point, in that German music is superior to any other, but those articles weren’t really about music. Yet at the same time Furtwängler did his best to save Jewish members of his orchestra.

Karajan, by contrast, was a Nazi through and through. He joined the Nazi party twice, first in his native Austria, then in Germany. When at his concerts he espied Hitler in the government box, Karajan arranged the public in the shape of the swastika to please the great man.

Was that apolitical? No? Then let me assure you that music is used for political purposes in Putin’s Russia as much as it was in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR.

Putin has an inner circle of sycophantic court musicians, such as Bashmet, Matsuev, Spivakov – and Gergiev. In fact, Gergiev’s name belongs at the top of that list.

In his eagerness to play lickspittle to monsters, Gergiev has outdone not only Furtwängler but even Karajan. That testifies to his loyalty: he and Putin have been close friends since the early ‘90s, when Putin served as KGB overseer to Petersburg’s mayor Sobchak, and Gergiev was beginning to make his bones on the concert circuit.

Gergiev has delivered openly propagandistic concerts in Ossetia and Syria, dedicating his performances to Putin’s conquests, while publicly praising the dictator for his capacity to instil fear. He has endorsed with genuine enthusiasm the annexation of the Crimea, along with every oppressive practice in Russia.

In 2014 Gergiev added his signature to the letter enthusing about Putin’s first foray into the Ukraine. We, said the signatories, “firmly declare our support for the position of the president of the Russian Federation”.

As a result of his devotion to Putin, Gergiev has acquired inordinate political power in Russian culture. Hardly any cultural event, to say nothing of musical ones, happens without his – which is to say Putin’s – endorsement.

His rewards far exceed those even extremely successful musicians can expect. According to Corriere della Sera, Gergiev’s property holdings in Italy alone are worth £150 million, and that’s but a drop in the ocean of his wealth. He is an oligarch of music, dealing in timber, oil and God knows what else.

That leaves little time to devote to music, other than conducting facile mockeries of sublime compositions. “One of the greatest in the world by all accounts”? No musician in the world, nor any serious music lover, would be able to suppress a derisory smile reading that.

In his prime, Gergiev was a good jobbing conductor, nothing much better than that. But his prime is long since past. He has become a musical money-grabbing ‘oligarch’ who would happily conduct a marching band, as long as the cheque didn’t bounce.

Even if he were indeed one of the world’s greatest, Gergiev’s performances would still be dreadful, considering that he hardly ever rehearses. He typically blows into town an hour before the concert, then spends the next hour and a half in his room talking to various financial consultants.

When the public begins to slow-calp, Gergiev generously agrees to climb the podium, where he spends the next hour or so going through the motions. He then collects his fee and hops on the plane to fly to the next venue.

Now he has been dumped by everybody, whinges O’Neill, including his management team, which nonetheless described him as “the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decency”.

If this is the account O’Neill goes by, he clearly doesn’t understand the role of impresarios in today’s musical world. Such chaps are as likely to say that their client is a genius as a used car salesman is to swear that “she’s not gonna give you any trouble at all”.

“McCarthyism is an overused word, I know,” writes O’Neill. “But really, what other word will do to describe the sacking of a conductor for refusing to publicly denounce the leader of Russia?”

May I suggest ‘long overdue justice’? Or ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’?

And yes, McCarthyism is indeed an overused word. But those who overuse it are invariably as bad at thinking and writing as Gergiev is at conducting. Brendan O’Neill is a case in point: the blighter doesn’t even know not to split his infinitives.

I’d like to conclude by shouting “Let’s go, Brendan!” My American readers will understand this is no compliment. The rest of you, just take my word for it.

The Ukraine isn’t going to get her Polish Mig-29s, even though the transfer was agreed. But then Poland’s feet got cold, with those of US and British positively turning to ice.

The Russians are busily using their air supremacy to massacre Ukrainian civilians. They are losing some planes and helicopters to SAMs and AA fire, but the losses aren’t exorbitant.

Hence President Zelensky is begging Nato to enforce a no-fly zone over his country, which entreaties are met with thunderous applause in both Parliament and Congress.

However, once those claps of thunder die out, the governments of both countries explain that complying with Zelensky’s plea would risk an all-out war with Russia, and we can’t have that, can we now? Awfully sorry about those strafed children, old boy, but no can do.

At that point Occam’s razor came out of its sheath, cutting through the fog of obfuscation with a simple solution. If Nato doesn’t want to fly sorties over the Ukraine, perhaps the Ukraine could do so herself.

You see, Poland’s air force still uses Soviet-made Mig-29s, and it so happens that Ukrainian pilots were trained on that very kit.

So they begged for the tools to do the job, and Poland was happy to oblige. She currently has 28 Mig-29s, about 20 of which are air-worthy. These planes aren’t as state-of-the-art as Russian Migs and SUs, but, as the old adage goes, the best plane is one flown by the best pilot.

Ukrainian fliers are confident of their ability and, above all, morale. Hence, when the Poles offered to transfer all their usable Migs to the Ukraine, the Ukrainians were ecstatic.

Nor would the transfer have denuded Poland’s own defences, for the Americans offered to give the country a brand-new F-16 for each Mig the Poles flew to the Ukraine. That way Poland would upgrade her own air force at no cost, while doing the right thing.

It was understood that the Migs would take off from Polish airfields, but that’s where the Poles’ feet froze. The Russians, they feared, might get cross and retaliate against Poland.

Thence came a transparent subterfuge. Poland offered to put the Migs at America’s disposal, with the Americans then getting them over to the Ukraine from their Ramstein base in Germany.

That’s where Americans drew the line. Poland, they said, is welcome to do whatever she wants with her Migs – as long as she doesn’t drag “the entire Nato alliance” in. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby dismissed the plan: “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.”

Our Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps agreed wholeheartedly: “It is important I think that we are a defensive organisation. Which means we won’t be getting directly involved in the war.”

A substantive rationale, Mr Kirby? How about the indiscriminate massacre of Ukrainian civilians?

Remember how concerned the US was 23 years ago about the genocide of Kosovars by Milosevic’s troops? On 24 March, 1999, Nato’s air force bombed Serbian targets (including the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade) to stop the on-going atrocity.

Why not do for Ukrainian Christians what you did for Kosovar Muslims? Oh well, I quite understand. Serbia didn’t have nuclear weapons and Russia does. No good poking that particular hornet’s nest.

A defensive organisation, Mr Shapps? So let’s defend ourselves, shall we? Let’s stop pretending that Russia’s offensive plans don’t extend past the Ukraine.

If Shapps still labours under that misapprehension, I suggest he watch any Russian TV channel for five minutes, picked at random. Russian Goebbelses will explain to him in simple words even he can understand (provided there’s an interpreter handy) that the Ukraine is merely the first battlefield of Russia’s war on Nato, which is to say the West, which is to say America and Britain especially.

That means a world war is already under way, and we deceive ourselves by pretending it isn’t. The longer we keep up the pretence, the weaker will be our strategic position when Russia leaves us no option but to fight.

Betrayal is indeed in the air. And Hungarian chief Orbán has inhaled that aura with both lungs.

Yesterday he announced that Hungary would not allow anyone to transport arms for the Ukraine through Hungarian territory. And there I was, thinking Hungary was a Nato member, not Putin’s best friend.

I jest. Orbán is indeed Putin’s friend and disciple, and he is busily creating a mafioso state patterned after Putin’s Russia.

In fact, I’ve seen reports showing that Orbán’s career has been financed by the FSB from the very beginning. That sinister organisation had what the Russians call kompromat: blackmail material based on Orbán’s dealings with the Russian capo di tutti capi, Semyon Mogilevich, who lived in Hungary for years.

Be that as it may, having initially made some perfunctory statements against the war, Orbán has since been sabotaging arms supplies to the Ukraine. I’m sure Putin has promised to reward his loyalty with plenty of discounted gas.

Ukrainian heroes have put up such stubborn and brilliant resistance that Russia’s disjointed ground offensive has stalled. It’s reasonably clear that Putin has only one reliable route to victory: carpet bombing the Ukraine flat, thereby breaking her fighting spirit.

Potentially that could result in millions of civilian victims, a scale of monstrosity even Milosevic couldn’t approach. Yet Joe Biden is hiding behind a technicality when he says that the US would only defend “every inch” of every Article 5 country.

The countries he has in mind are the Baltics, the three Nato members probably next on Putin’s hit list. It so happens that they were admitted into Nato in 2002, while the Ukraine’s application was rejected in 2008.

That technicality is too flimsy to hide behind. If Putin is allowed to bomb the Ukraine into submission, possibly even resorting to nuclear weapons, the Baltics’ turn will certainly come next. The Russians would then have all the momentum, leaving Nato only two options.

Option 1 will be to fight, risking a nuclear Armageddon. Since Russia outnumbers Nato ten to one in tactical nuclear weapons, Nato would have to go strategic, and something tells me Messrs Biden, Johnson and Macron aren’t the kind of leaders who could do that.

That leaves only Option 2: abject surrender and the dismantling of the system of collective security that has so far protected the West adequately. In effect, the West would welcome Russia into Europe with both arms open and flung up in the air.

The risk of a cataclysm would be much lower now, if Nato were to hand those Migs to Ukrainian pilots and wish them Godspeed. For betraying Ukrainian civilians, leaving them to their gruesome fate, is worse than immoral. It’s not going to work.